GIFsmos.com – Have Students Learn About Functions by Creating Animated GIFs

GIFsmos.com is a free site where you and your students can create animated gifs with functions on a graphing calculator simulator. There are a variety of uses for this including showing the relation between parent and child functions, translations, rotations, etc. It’s easy to use, just follow the steps below to get started!

Enter your formula in the space provided. Check out the image (left) for an example. An animated gif is created with a series of pictures that are quickly rotated or displayed to give the illusion of animation. Click on the + to take a snapshot of your formula to create the first image.

For this example we are starting with the parent function y=x^2 written as f(x) = x^2 + 0. We will change the value of the y intercept to create the remaining images for this example.

Take a snapshot of each variation of your function by clicking on the + in order to animate the changes.

To make the animation smoother we changed the y intercept in increments of + or – 1 so the graph moves above and below the x axis.

Be sure to capture the changes at each step.

Click on the save button when you have finished. The gif will then likely be displayed in a new browser tab. You can then right click or select click on the image to save it to your device.